The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Teleconference Horror

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2020-08-12

In the spring of 2020, with very little warning, every school in the United States shut down due to the ongoing global pandemic. Classrooms had to move to virtual meeting software like Zoom, which was never intended to be used as the primary means of educating grade schoolers. The teachers did wonderfully with such little notice, and most kids finished out the year with at least a little more knowledge than they started. This story takes place years before then, when online schooling was seen as an optional add-on and not a necessary backup plan in case of plague.

14 comments - Last comment @ 18:06

The Concatenator

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-08-11

In English, there's much debate over the "Oxford Comma": in a list of items, do you put a comma between the penultimate item and the "and" before the final one? For example: "The conference featured bad programmers, Remy and TheDailyWTF readers" versus "The conference featured bad programmers, Remy, and the TheDailyWTF readers."

I'd like to introduce a subtly different one: "the concatenator's comma", or if we want to be generic "the concatenator's seperator character", but that doesn't have the same ring to it. If you're planning to list items as a string, you might to something like this pseudocode:

28 comments - Last comment @ 08:14

I'm Blue

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-08-10

Designers are used to getting vague direction from clients. "It should have more pop!" or "Can you make the blue more blue?" But Kevin was a contractor who worked on embedded software, so he didn't really expect to have to deal with that, even if he did have to deal with colors a fair bit.

Kevin was taking over a contract from another developer to build software for a colorimeter, a device to measure color. When companies, like paint companies, care about color, they tend to really care about color, and need to be able to accurately observe a real-world color. Once you start diving deep into color theory, you start having to think about things like observers, and illuminants and tristimulus models and "perceptual color spaces".

25 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-11

All Natural Errors

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2020-08-07

"I'm glad the asdf is vegan. I'm really thinking of going for the asasdfsadf, though. With a name like that, you know it's got to be 2 1/2 times as good for you," writes VJ.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-10

A Slow Moving Stream

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-08-06

We’ve talked about Java’s streams in the past. It’s hardly a “new” feature at this point, but its blend of “being really useful” and “based on functional programming techniques” and “different than other APIs” means that we still have developers struggling to figure out how to use it.

Jeff H has a co-worker, Clarence, who is very “anti-stream”. “It creates too many copies of our objects, so it’s terrible for memory, and it’s so much slower. Don’t use streams unless you absolutely have to!” So in many a code review, Jeff submits some very simple, easy to read, and fast-performing bit of stream code, and Clarence objects. “It’s slow. It wastes memory.”

15 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-10

A Private Code Review

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-08-05

Jessica has worked with some cunning developers in the past. To help cope with some of that “cunning”, they’ve recently gone out searching for new developers.

Now, there were some problems with their job description and salary offer, specifically, they were asking for developers who do too much and get paid too little. Which is how Jessica started working with Blair. Jessica was hoping to staff up her team with some mid-level or junior developers with a background in web development. Instead, she got Blair, a 13+ year veteran who had just started doing web development in the past six months.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-10

A Massive Leak

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2020-08-04

"Memory leaks are impossible in a garbage collected language!" is one of my favorite lies. It feels true, but it isn't. Sure, it's much harder to make them, and they're usually much easier to track down, but you can still create a memory leak. Most times, it's when you create objects, dump them into a data structure, and never empty that data structure. Usually, it's just a matter of finding out what object references are still being held. Usually.

A few months ago, I discovered a new variation on that theme. I was working on a C# application that was leaking memory faster than bad waterway engineering in the Imperial Valley.

A large, glowing, computer-controlled chandelier

57 comments - Last comment @ 12:32

A Unique Choice

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2020-08-03

There are many ways to mess up doing unique identifiers. It's a hard problem, and that's why we've sorta agreed on a few distinct ways to do it. First, we can just autonumber. Easy, but it doesn't always scale that well, especially in distributed systems. Second, we can use something like UUIDs: mix a few bits of real data in with a big pile of random data, and you can create a unique ID. Finally, there are some hashing-related options, where the data itself generates its ID.

Tiffanie was digging into some weird crashes in a database application, and discovered that their MODULES table couldn't decide which was correct, and opted for two: MODULE_ID, an autonumbered field, and MODULE_UUID, which one would assume, held a UUID. There were also the requsite MODULE_NAME and similar fields. A quick scan of the table looked like:

MODULE_ID	MODULE_NAME	MODULE_UUID	MODULE_DESC
0	Defects	8461aa9b-ba38-4201-a717-cee257b73af0	Defects
1	Test Plan	06fd18eb-8214-4431-aa66-e11ae2a6c9b3	Test Plan

22 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-09

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